Saturday, August 26, 2006

Melanie Kirkpatrick wrote in OpinionJournalIf Reagan had his way on SDI, threats from North Korea and Iran would loom smaller today.

Do you think that the Democrats that worked to block Reagan's efforts wish they had not. Of course not. They just blame the problems with North Korea and Iran on GWB, and think that if they were just in charge, things would be much better. Well what if they were in charge, what would they do? Try to negotiate with a Nutcase that believes that he has a chance to cause the End of the World, and bring on the return of the 12th Imam? What do these idiots think they could offer him to persuade him not to do that?

And what about the other Nutcase that spends all of his country's money building up his army, to protect him from being invaded from neighbors that have absolutely no intention of invading him. What would they want with a country full of starving people? How do the Dems think they could "negotiate" with him. All he wants is more money to make his military even stronger.

In his 1983 "Star Wars" speech, Ronald Reagan famously asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge . . . that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil?"

It would certainly be nice.

.... "If you look at all of the money that's been spent on missile defense since Ronald Reagan started the program in 1983--adding in the 2006 budget--it's approaching about $100 billion, $90-something billion dollars. If you look at the damage costs from 9/11 alone just in New York City, based on a GAO report of 2002, it was $83 billion. That means if we can prevent just one attack against one major U.S. city, we almost would have paid for the entire program for the last 24 years."

Actually NYC was not hit by a nuke on a missle; it just had a couple of airplanes fly into two buildings.

.... He also favors putting more sophisticated sensors in space. "If someone had told me 15 or 20 years ago that we'd be fighting in Afghanistan, I wouldn't have believed them. We don't know where we're going to be fighting in the next 20 years . . . and so instead of populating radars around the world to try to guess where those threats are going to be coming from, it makes a lot of sense to go to space . . . We have sensors in space but they are not sensors that you can accurately track from."

This would be an important reason for our investment in NASA.

At the time of Reagan's missile-defense speech, Gen. Obering was an Air Force captain on loan to the space shuttle program at the Kennedy Space Center. Does he remember the speech? "Oh, yes, very much so. It was very dramatic. . . . It was intriguing to me to [see] the vision that President Reagan had--to say, you know, we don't have to live under this threat. We can actually do something about it." Does he object to the term "Star Wars," the mocking nickname given by Sen. Ted Kennedy to what was then known as the Strategic Defense Initiative? A big smile crosses his face. "Personally, I don't. . . . When you look at what the 'Star Wars' movie was really about, I think it fits. . . . It was basically the force of good trying to address the force of evil."